100 research outputs found
The Dark Side of Micro-Task Marketplaces: Characterizing Fiverr and Automatically Detecting Crowdturfing
As human computation on crowdsourcing systems has become popular and powerful
for performing tasks, malicious users have started misusing these systems by
posting malicious tasks, propagating manipulated contents, and targeting
popular web services such as online social networks and search engines.
Recently, these malicious users moved to Fiverr, a fast-growing micro-task
marketplace, where workers can post crowdturfing tasks (i.e., astroturfing
campaigns run by crowd workers) and malicious customers can purchase those
tasks for only $5. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of
Fiverr. First, we identify the most popular types of crowdturfing tasks found
in this marketplace and conduct case studies for these crowdturfing tasks.
Then, we build crowdturfing task detection classifiers to filter these tasks
and prevent them from becoming active in the marketplace. Our experimental
results show that the proposed classification approach effectively detects
crowdturfing tasks, achieving 97.35% accuracy. Finally, we analyze the real
world impact of crowdturfing tasks by purchasing active Fiverr tasks and
quantifying their impact on a target site. As part of this analysis, we show
that current security systems inadequately detect crowdsourced manipulation,
which confirms the necessity of our proposed crowdturfing task detection
approach
Characterizing Key Stakeholders in an Online Black-Hat Marketplace
Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that
facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook
likes, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO), or bogus Amazon reviews. In
order to deploy effective technical and legal countermeasures, it is important
to understand how these black-hat marketplaces operate, shedding light on the
services they offer, who is selling, who is buying, what are they buying, who
is more successful, why are they successful, etc. Toward this goal, in this
paper, we present a detailed micro-economic analysis of a popular online
black-hat marketplace, namely, SEOClerks.com. As the site provides
non-anonymized transaction information, we set to analyze selling and buying
behavior of individual users, propose a strategy to identify key users, and
study their tactics as compared to other (non-key) users. We find that key
users: (1) are mostly located in Asian countries, (2) are focused more on
selling black-hat SEO services, (3) tend to list more lower priced services,
and (4) sometimes buy services from other sellers and then sell at higher
prices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis with respect to
devising effective economic and legal intervention strategies against
marketplace operators and key users.Comment: 12th IEEE/APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2017
Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems
Malicious crowdsourcing forums are gaining traction as sources of spreading
misinformation online, but are limited by the costs of hiring and managing
human workers. In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage
deep learning language models (Recurrent Neural Networks or RNNs) to automate
the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Not only are
these attacks cheap and therefore more scalable, but they can control rate of
content output to eliminate the signature burstiness that makes crowdsourced
campaigns easy to detect.
Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a two phased review
generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are
indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. We conduct a
survey-based user study to show these reviews not only evade human detection,
but also score high on "usefulness" metrics by users. Finally, we develop novel
automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy
transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. We consider
countermeasures against our mechanisms, show that they produce unattractive
cost-benefit tradeoffs for attackers, and that they can be further curtailed by
simple constraints imposed by online service providers
Are We All in a Truman Show? Spotting Instagram Crowdturfing through Self-Training
Influencer Marketing generated $16 billion in 2022. Usually, the more popular
influencers are paid more for their collaborations. Thus, many services were
created to boost profiles' popularity metrics through bots or fake accounts.
However, real people recently started participating in such boosting activities
using their real accounts for monetary rewards, generating ungenuine content
that is extremely difficult to detect. To date, no works have attempted to
detect this new phenomenon, known as crowdturfing (CT), on Instagram.
In this work, we propose the first Instagram CT engagement detector. Our
algorithm leverages profiles' characteristics through semi-supervised learning
to spot accounts involved in CT activities. Compared to the supervised
approaches used so far to identify fake accounts, semi-supervised models can
exploit huge quantities of unlabeled data to increase performance. We purchased
and studied 1293 CT profiles from 11 providers to build our self-training
classifier, which reached 95\% F1-score. We tested our model in the wild by
detecting and analyzing CT engagement from 20 mega-influencers (i.e., with more
than one million followers), and discovered that more than 20% was artificial.
We analyzed the CT profiles and comments, showing that it is difficult to
detect these activities based solely on their generated content
Building a Task Blacklist for Online Social Systems
Hiding inside the mutually-beneficial model of online crowdsourcing are malicious campaigns, which target manipulating search results or leaving fake reviews on the web. Crowdsourced manipulation reduces the quality and trustworthiness of online social media, threatening the security of cyberspace as a whole. To mitigate this problem, we developed a classification model which filters out malicious campaigns from nearly 450,000 campaigns on popular crowdsourcing platforms. We then presented this blacklist on a website, where parties adversely affected by malicious campaigns, such as targeted websites owners, legitimate workers, owners of the crowdsourcing platforms, can use this website as a tool to identify and moderate potential malicious campaigns from the web
Online Misinformation: Challenges and Future Directions
Misinformation has become a common part of our digital media environments and it is compromising the ability of our societies to form informed opinions. It generates misperceptions, which have affected the decision making processes in many domains, including economy, health, environment, and elections, among others. Misinformation and its generation, propagation, impact, and management is being studied through a variety of lenses (computer science, social science, journalism, psychology, etc.) since it widely affects multiple aspects of society. In this paper we analyse the phenomenon of misinformation from a technological point of view.We study the current socio-technical advancements towards addressing the problem, identify some of the key limitations of current technologies, and propose some ideas to target such limitations. The goal of this position paper is to reflect on the current state of the art and to stimulate discussions on the future design and development of algorithms, methodologies, and applications
Fake Likers Detection on Facebook
In online social networking sites, gaining popularity has become important. The more popular a company is, the more profits it can make. A way to measure a company\u27s popularity is to check how many likes it has (e.g., the company\u27s number of likes in Facebook). To instantly and artificially increase the number of likes, some companies and business people began hiring crowd workers (aka fake likers) who send likes to a targeted page and earn money. Unfortunately, little is known about characteristics of the fake likers and how to identify them. To uncover fake likers in online social networks, in this work we (i) collect profiles of fake likers and legitimate likers by using linkage and honeypot approaches, (ii) analyze characteristics of fake likers and legitimate likers, (iii) propose and develop a fake liker detection approach, and (iv) thoroughly evaluate its performance against three baseline methods and under two attack models. Our experimental results show that our cassification model significantly outperformed the baseline methods, achieving 87.1% accuracy and 0.1 false positive rate and 0.14 false negative rate
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